Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive
rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful
environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list
of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are
often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give
no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places
argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights
tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining
positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been
overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution.

Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's
state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the
federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting
American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in
trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal
counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national
concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in
depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform,
explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their
struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under
capitalism.

Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.

"Emily Zackin argues that the United States has a long history of
positive rights protection, created and fostered by political outsiders
who wanted to change society and disrupt the status quo. We will find
this tradition not in the federal constitution, but in our country's
many state constitutions. This is a crucially important book revealing
an unjustly neglected feature of America's constitutional
traditions."--Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

"This is an extremely important
book that will be widely discussed. One of the pathologies of the
standard approach to American constitutionalism is its exclusive focus
on the U.S. Constitution and the concomitant ignorance of the rich
materials to be found in the literally dozens of American state
constitutions. This book will be an extremely important wake-up call for
most readers."--Sanford Levinson, author of Constitutional Faith